Reply #33: Interesting -- but sometimes I think the exact opposite [View All]

[HamdenRice]

My experience with the public schools in New York City is that they are too focused on "thinking" skills and not enough on knowledge -- kind of an over-reaction to the rote learning that my generation suffered through.

For example, 3rd and 4th graders start learning the fundamentals of algebra and critical thinking about math. But they haven't mastered the addition, subtraction, multiplication and division tables. In other words, there is a kind of "numbers sense" that you have to master through rote before you can learn a higher mathematical sense.

I also find that in social studies, they learn broad concepts but don't learn the actual countries, their geographies and so forth that give those concepts meaning. Or they learn big historical concepts, but not dates.

Kids can tell you about, for example, the broad concept of civil rights, but have no conception of the passage of time, based on dates in history, that enable them to judge when, say, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement actually took place.